About the artist
Nicola Anthony is an artist & writer working internationally. This year she will exhibit at The Substation Gallery, Ikkan Art Gallery, and Displacements in Singapore. In 2012, she exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery Project Space (London), the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (USA), & featured in shows around London & LA. Nicola Anthony has received sponsorship from Tate Britain, & exhibited in Tate Modern’s ‘No Soul for Sale’. Alongside her artistic practice, Nicola also curates and creates art events and happenings to champion the arts, and is proactive in both the London and Singapore art worlds.
Using words as sculptural materials, & sentences as lines with which to draw, Nicola Anthony has a fascination with messages, narratives & text. Her practice is inspired by literary sources, deconstructing & reconstructing, mapping & memory, as well as the structure & understanding of language.
Her materials & subjects can be diverse, but are linked by her desire to illuminate the little things that comprise the whole: The fragile constructs, moments & complexities that go unnoticed unless we look from a different angle. It is this concern that often instills a multilayered intricacy to her practice.
Receiving critical acclaim for her artworks which play with the way we read meaning into text & icons, the artist investigates text both in a literal sense & as any object that can be "read". Through fragmenting & reappropriating social constructs, narratives & archetypes, she explores what happens when we reinterpret them. The artist has used words, dates & notations of time to render portraits; dissected currency to make re-mixed dollar bills or British notes; fragmented novels to rewrite their stories; & deconstructed the ways in which we visually represent time – rebuilding a 2D ‘calendar structure’ using transparent glass & resin cubes, in a shimmering exploration of time, chaos & order.
As well as working as an artist, Anthony also lectures & writes about art for a number of journals & publications. Working internationally, most artwork is created in either her London or Singapore art studio. She was educated at Loughborough University (UK), & Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London). Spending her formative years in the UK, Anthony also has an Asian heritage which influences her work, and she is fascinated by other cultures.
The Word Collection Project
The words & stories which form the basis of the work are collected through the artist's ongoing ‘Word Collection Project’, gathering stories & secrets from her online & offline audiences, giving people the chance to make themselves the subject. Contributions have been beautiful, moving, dark, funny, intriguing, rude, touching, & varied. The collection exists both as an evolving text artwork & a whispered sound installation. (See a gallery of a word collection project event at an exhibition in London's Notting Hill here).